‘Emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power’ (William Reddy, 1997)

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences are increasingly turning their attention to the affective dimension of power, and the way in which emotions are implicit in the exercise of power in all its forms. The language of power has long been used to calibrate the impact of emotions – feelings ‘shake’ and ‘grip’ us; we read of and recall moments when passions convulsed communities and animated violent actions. Strategic displays of emotion have regularly been used for the exercise and negotiation of power.

This conference will draw on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise to address the relationships between two fundamental concepts in social and historical inquiry: power and emotion. How are historical forms of cultural, social, religious, political and soft power linked with the expression, performance and control of emotions? How has power been negotiated and resisted through expressions of emotions? How have emotional cultures sustained or been produced by particular structures of power? How have understandings and expressions of emotion played out within cross-cultural encounters and conflicts? What has been the relationship between intimate, personal feeling and its public, collective manifestations?

Literary and artistic works as well as objects of diverse kinds are often said to produce or to have elicited powerful emotions. Yet how has this varied across time, space, cultures and gender? What visual, verbal and gestural rhetorics have been considered to act most potently upon the emotions in different periods? How have these conventions related to ideas of the inexpressibility of powerful or traumatic emotional experience, its resistance to aesthetic articulation? What are the implications of this for the recoverability of past emotional experience? And how does the study of the power of feeling relate to more traditionally social conceptions of hierarchy, society, and power? What new understandings of the workings of power do we gain through the perspective of a history of emotions?

This interdisciplinary conference is jointly organized by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the Centres for Medieval Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. It invites papers that address the above issues from disciplines including, but not restricted to: history, religion, literature, art, music, politics, archaeology, philosophy and anthropology.

Papers and panels might focus on the following questions and themes:

Emotion and political and social action: How have emotions been used by various political, religious and other groups to reinforce or to undermine social and political hierarchies? What role did gender play in these processes?

Dynasty, rule and emotional display.

The affective dimensions of war, protest, revolution and nation building

Diplomacy and the negotiation of cross-cultural emotions

Religious change, power and emotions

How has the relationship between emotions / passions and power been understood and theorized across time?

The micro-politics of intimate relationships and gendered power

The role of ritual, object and liturgy in managing, intensifying, or disciplining political, religious or other emotions

What techniques and venues have been used to construct and amplify collective emotions? Papers might consider mass meetings, crowds, congregations, theatres, assemblies and clubs.

The organisers welcome proposals for individual 20-minute papers, for panels (which may adopt a more innovative format, including round-tables, a larger number of short presentations), or for postgraduate poster presentations.

Conference themes

How do emotions relate to the self? On one possible view, emotions stand outside the self: they reflect biological drives or cultural demands independent of – perhaps even inimical to – the subject’s own interests or values; when we act out of emotion, we are driven to act by psychological forces external to ourselves. But on another view, our emotional dispositions help to constitute who we are; words and deeds that come ‘from the heart’ are judged to have a special kind of worth, arising from their authenticity. In everyday contexts, people seem to think about emotion in both these ways, depending on the situation. But can these two views be reconciled? And if not, which view comes closer to the truth?
The purpose of this conference is to throw light on these questions, capitalising on the progress that has been made in the philosophy of emotion in recent years, as well as drawing on studies in the history of philosophy and on a range of philosophical traditions.

Directions for conference delegates

For a printable map of Senate House and nearest London underground and railway stations, please click on How to get to Senate House. Senate House is part of the University of London and helpful advice on different options for travel and transport are available here.

& the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE)

Columbia University Faculty House

Friday, September 30, 2016

Keynote speaker:

Fiona Somerset, Professor, Department of English, University of Connecticut

This conference addresses multiple challenges in the study of affect and emotion in the pre-modern period. To what extent can we assume commensurability between contemporary definitions and understandings of affect or emotion and earlier, pre-modern iterations? Can we historicize affect? How do we? One strategy is to read across the surface in pre-modern works, looking for the explicit naming of emotional states (for example, “anger” or “joy”) and the gestures and expressions associated with those states; but another might be to read between the lines and find less discursively obvious articulations of affect or emotion. How, for example, do we discern or quantify affect in a culture that might value understatement and reserve? How do we read the absence, or indeed, the extremes of emotional expression or affect in texts? How do cultural texts (artistic, literary, religious etc.) contribute to the history of emotions? And how do we account for emotional change across time?

Papers for this conference should address these themes in pre-modern texts (pre-1500) from around the world. “Texts” can be constructed loosely, as written, oral, aural, visual, literary, political, administrative, religious, etc.

exploring how to discern emotional experience that is not categorized, or categorizable

recognizing mixed emotions

exploring the role of gestures, facial expressions, movements in art and literature

interpreting the absence of emotional expression or affect altogether

reading the filiation of certain emotions with the presence of faith/obedience, or with practices of conversion and devotion and the cultivation of community

tracing unstated, unnamed emotions

making associations between emotions and visual culture

aligning the modern or contemporary interest in emotions and affects with the pre-modern

interrogating the relation between emotions and conceptions of private and public life in the pre-modern

reading emotions in cross-cultural encounters

pedagogy and pre-modern affect

Submission deadline for abstracts: May 1, 2016. Abstracts of 300 words accompanied by a brief biographical paragraph should be submitted to conference organizers Patricia Dailey and Lauren Mancia (Columbia University Seminar on Affect Studies) and Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne/ARC CHE): premodern.affect@gmail.com. Papers should be up to 20 minutes in length.

Subventionsfor travel or lodging will be available to graduate students giving papers. To apply for a subvention, write an additional paragraph explaining how this paper and conference fit into your larger program of graduate study, what funds you already have access to, and what approximate costs you will have in traveling to and staying near Columbia for the conference. Submit this paragraph along with your abstract and biographical paragraph by May 1, 2016.

Mobilizing Emotions in South Asian Politics

EMOPOLIS Concluding International Conference

8-9 February 2016 | 9:15 – 18:00

Venue : Rooms 638-641 – 190 avenue de France 75013 Paris

This conference concludes the research program « Emotions and Political Mobilizations in the Indian Subcontinent » (EMOPOLIS), jointly sponsored by Emergence(s)-Mairie de Paris and the Centre for South Asian Studies-CNRS/EHESS. It is organized with the support of the Center for the History of Emotions-Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin) and of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Contentious politics in South Asia, in its many forms, has been studied through a variety of theoretical angles: class- and status-based patterns of domination, organizational base, political contexts and opportunities, ideological frames, etc. Its emotional dynamics, however, is yet to be exploreddespite the pervasiveness of the language of outrage, hurt, anger, humiliation, revenge, pride, despair, nostalgia, hope, enthusiasm or love in such protests. Conversely, although the “emotional turn”(D. Gould) in social movements studies since the late 1990s has offered important correctives to the robotic picture of the protestors of the past, it has largely neglected non-Western contexts, especially the Indian sub-continent, both as a field of application and as a field of elaboration of new analyses of the mutual constitution of emotions and mobilizations.

The identification of this double research gap, the shared conviction that integrating emotions will improve our understanding of political mobilizations in South Asia, as much as focusing on this region will retool our thinking about the emotional dynamics of mobilization, led a group of scholars from France, Germany, the United States, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to embark, in 2012, into an exploratory research program on “Emotions and Political Mobilizations in the Indian Subcontinent-EMOPOLIS”, funded by Paris City’s support program to fundamental research, Emergence(s). In this concluding conference of the program these researchers, coming from diverse disciplinary traditions (democratic studies, social movements analysis, sociology and history of emotions, political and religious anthropology, cultural and literature studies), will present their main findings and propositions for further inquiries on the role that emotions play in shaping different cases of political protests in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

What does it take for citizenship to be felt during public hearings? Which “sensitizing devices” (C. Traïni) help transform a millennial movement into a political mobilization? What kind of “emotion work” (A. Hochschild) is required for feminists to bring about change in legislation? Why does the historicization of communal riots have so much to gain from bringing emotions – and emotion knowledge – back in? How is the poetic language of protest historically shaped by the language of emotions? When doeshurt become an attribute of collectives thusconstructed as “being through feelings” (S. Ahmed)? In which conditions does the opposition between ideological opponentsbecome a source of greater, and deadly, political despair? How can cinematic anger be mobilized in electoral politics? What is the mobilizing potential of humor and does it generate community feelings or block them? How is the “emotional commitment” (L. Mitchell) to an armed struggle altered by its life cycle? Should Jihadism be considered as an emotional experience and if so, what are the analytical and methodological implications? And finally, is social constructionism the best theoretical tool to explore what emotions do to political mobilization?These are some of the questions that the EMOPOLIS team members will address during this conference.

– a methodological discussion on how emotions (and which aspects of emotions) can be accessed;

– a theoretical interest in the dialectic relationship between mobilized emotions and mobilizing emotions;

– an effort to contextualize the norms and rules governing the public expression of emotions, to address the “emotionality of [various] institutional settings” (H. Flam), and to explore vernacular emotion terms.

Amélie Blom (Sciences Po) and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (CNRS-CEIAS)

MONDAY 8TH FEBRUARY 2016

9:15 | Welcome coffee

9:30 – 11:00 | Session 1

Opening Session

Welcome address by the CEIAS directorial board

Introduction

Amélie Blom (Sciences Po Le Havre)

Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal(CNRS-CEIAS)

Keynote addresses

Christophe Traïni (IEP Aix-CHERPA)

Lisa Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania)

11:00 – 12:30 | Session 2

Political Affects: Two Social Movements in Focus

Chair: Virginie Dutoya (CNRS-Centre Emile Durkheim)

Paradoxes of the Popular: Despair and Democracy in Bangladesh

Nusrat S. Chowdhury (Amherst College)

When Emotions Become Fuel: The Passage of the Anti-Sexual Harassment Legislation in Pakistan

Sadaf Ahmad (Lahore University of Management Sciences)

Discussion

Joel Cabalion (Université de Tours)

14:00 – 15:30 | Session 3

Sensitizing Devices

Chair: Amélie Blom (Sciences Po Le Havre)

It’s Effective because it’s Affective: The Dynamics and Significance of Emotions in a Delhi Public Hearing

Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (CNRS-CEIAS)

Nostalgia and Hope: Mobilizing through the Longing for Netaji in a Contemporary Millennial Movement in West Bengal

Raphaël Voix (CNRS-CEIAS)

Discussion

Lisa Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania)

Coffee break

15:50 – 17:20 | Session 4

Directing Political Emotions in Spaces of Popular Culture

Chair: Julien Levesque (EHESS-CEIAS)

Mobilizing Anger in Andhra Pradesh: The Politics of the Angry Young Man and Popular Telugu Cinema

Imke Rajamani (Center for the History of Emotions-Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin)

Navigation des articles

A Research Program on Emotions in the Middle Ages

The aim of the research team gathered around project EMMA is to investigate various sources to show the relevance of a historical anthropology of emotions and affective phenomena applied to the Middle Ages.